Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!gatech!udel!mmdf
From: Ata@multics.radc.af.mil (John G. Ata)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Why do you need metaphor? (Re: What should be learned
Message-ID: <22976@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 31 Aug 89 22:02:22 GMT
Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU
Lines: 47


    Delivery-Date:  28 August 1989 10:24 edt
    Delivery-By:  Ata.SysMaint
    Sender:  amiga-relay-request at UDEL.EDU
    Date:  Saturday, 26 August 1989 00:55 edt
    From:  Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian at WELL.UUCP>
    Subject:  Re: Why do you need metaphor? (Re: What should be learned from Unix
    To:  amiga-relay at UDEL.EDU
    Newsgroups:  comp.sys.amiga.tech
    Keywords:  Multics, Unix, Bell Labs
    Organization:  Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
    

    All the blurb about Multix is also wide of the mark.  I was responding
    to a series of articles all claiming in essence "Unix isn't so great,
    look at this (long-after-Unix-developed) much nicer way to chose a
    metaphor of device access"; and I attempted to provide a bit of historical
    context to the discussion.  This does not require me to trace the concepts
    back to Babbage, and frankly, except for being the predecessor that drove
    the Unix developers away to do things better, Multics was a dinosaur, however
    nice the ideas incorporated.  Don't believe me?  Check its market share
                                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    versus Unix or even the OS-360's children. ;-)

I hope you are not judging the merits of an operating system by it's
market share.  The fact that Multics didn't do well in the market place
has really nothing whatsoever to do with the technical merits of the
operating system.  There were many different forces at play here
including the non-marketing of Multics by its vendor and the prohibitive
cost of the hardware platform it ran on.  Perhaps you think that MS-DOS
is a technically superior operating system to the AmigaOS because it's
market share is so much larger. :-)
    
    improve the world.  The Unix file as a stream of bytes paradigm made a
    horrendously complicated process in every other file system much easier
    to comprehend.  And no, that god-awful segmented mess that was Multics
    idea of a file doesn't begin to compare.

Indeed!  Perhaps you would like to make a comparison?  I suspect that
although your knowlege of Unix is present, your understanding of the
Multics system is not all that deep.  Please note that the segmentation
and paging on Multics, as well as the file structure in a stream file,
is invisible to the programmer where a segment to most programmers is
merely a file.


                                        John G. Ata